Pity the die-hard Canadian Football League fan who tuned into Justin Trudeau’s press conference on Wednesday morning.

With the CFL having let slip late Tuesday that it was asking the federal government for somewhere between $30-million and $150-million to help it stay afloat as its 2020 season is seriously imperilled by the coronavirus pandemic, this was the first chance to hear what the Prime Minister thought about that. Would he indicate that a life preserver was at hand?

Well, no. Trudeau responded to a question about the CFL’s request with as little detail as it was possible to offer while still acknowledging the question. The government is talking to a lot of businesses about possible supports, he said. The CFL is one of them, he acknowledged. “Those discussions are ongoing,” he said. The verbal equivalent of the blank-face emoji.

This is, to be fair to Trudeau, not out of the ordinary. Politicians give non-answers to specific questions all the time, although Trudeau has really raised his game on that front in his daily sessions outside Rideau Cottage. But for the CFL and its fans, it is akin to hanging from a cliff, asking someone to hold out an arm, and being told that they will take the matter under consideration.

The edge-of-a-cliff metaphor is particularly apt. As has been clear for weeks, the prospects for a CFL season amid a pandemic are exceedingly grim. Even as some provinces begin to ease stay-at-home restrictions, their various proposals for a return to normalcy put large public gatherings at the end of the line, for the obvious reason that one infected person in a packed stadium could undo months of effort to bring the virus under control. And while other professional leagues are considering empty stadiums should they resume operations, that idea isn’t feasible for a CFL that brings in about half its revenues from ticket sales and game-day concessions. Without paying customers in stadiums, the CFL simply doesn’t have a viable business model. And so, the pleas to Ottawa.

But even if the CFL is in desperate need of emergency support, the role of government in any rescue plan will be a tricky one to sort out. It’s a unique business in that almost all of its revenue is derived from spring to fall, when games are played. And while all kinds of companies have been dramatically impacted by a global economic pause, the vast majority were earning revenue until restrictions hit last month. CFL teams have been in their revenue-producing lean times for months, and the normal spring spike has been pushed back indefinitely. They can make an argument for emergency assistance just like those being made by hotels and airlines and any number of industries, including the media.

Shane Bergman of the Calgary Stampeders runs onto the field during player introductions before facing the Toronto Argonauts in CFL football in July 2019.Al Charest/Postmedia Network

The problem is that the CFL is a modest league with several non-modest participants.

The federal government might quite like the idea of propping up community-owned teams in Edmonton, Regina, and Winnipeg, especially to preserve the many hourly-wage jobs that those franchises provide on game days, but there are six other teams for whom the idea of a handout becomes more complicated. Three teams — B.C., Hamilton and Montreal — are owned by entrepreneurs who are independently wealthy. The remaining three, in Ottawa, Calgary and Toronto, are owned by business that control multiple professional sports teams, and those businesses are owned by various real-estate developers, oil executives and telecom conglomerates. So while a cancelled 2020 CFL season might dramatically impact the specific business of, for example, the Toronto Argonauts, what it would mean in the grand picture of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment, and beyond that to its majority owners Bell and Rogers, is much less clear.

When the CFL says it would “open its books” to the government to explain the potential losses caused by a lost season, it almost certainly doesn’t mean it would open all those other books, too.

When there is push back, the argument quickly becomes about how the public money is needed because the team will fold or leave town or won’t come in the first place

All of this would be slightly more palatable if the CFL, like other pro sports leagues, didn’t already have the habit of seeking public money to subsidize its business. Tax dollars are poured into stadium construction and refurbishment, even if the business case mostly amounts to “people like sports.” When there is push back, the argument quickly becomes about how the public money is needed because the team will fold or leave town or won’t come in the first place. The list of governments that have been suckered by this ploy is now so long that it’s a complete surprise when a sports team doesn’t seek taxpayer money for a capital expense.

The pandemic is, obviously, something else entirely. The CFL’s teams, especially those that are community owned, are facing a crisis that is unlikely to be solved by a rapidly improving public-health picture. But the public can be forgiven for being suspicious of professional sports leagues that come seeking handouts. Even if this time they really mean it.

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